Wireless networks are becoming increasingly popular and are being widely deployed across many environments. For example, wireless local area networks (WLANs) are seeing increased use in homes, offices, universities and other public areas. Despite the recent dramatic surge in use, WLAN performance today is far from optimized, thus user experiences may vary due to significant changes which may occur over short periods of time in the environment of the wireless network.
Industry standards, such as the various 802.11x technologies governed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), have yet to adequately address efficient wireless network management. Current WLANs use a distributed coordination function (DCF) to access the wireless channel. DCF uses a carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) technique in which receivers send acknowledgements (ACKs) if they successfully receive a packet, otherwise the transmitter resends the packet.
Accordingly, the performance of DCF heavily depends on channel load and the number of users competing for an access point (AP) and its associated wireless channel. When an AP and its associated wireless channel are overloaded, the throughput per user often decreases which means lower performance for all users, not just for the last few who connected. Up to now, most research into improving performance optimization in wireless environments has focused on adjusting only one parameter in the media access control (MAC) layer at a time. However, since a wireless environment can be plagued with a combination of factors such as interference, weak signal strength packet collisions and other detrimental problems, it would be desirable to monitor various network environment parameters and adjust multiple network configuration parameters at the same time to improve wireless performance.